Note: Fr. Matthew Lamb was, since its founding in 1999, a member of the Advisory Board of the Faith & Reason Institute, the parent institution of The Catholic Thing. He was a dear friend and his passing is a great loss to America and the Church. – Robert Royal

In his doctoral colloquia on the ancients and the moderns, Fr. Lamb was fond of observing Socrates’ final line from the Apology, “But now it is time to go away, I to die and you to live. Which of us goes to a better thing is unclear to everyone except to the god.” A lifelong lover of Plato and Aristotle, Fr. Lamb never hesitated, however, to affirm the newness of the Gospel and its promise of eternal life. Unlike Socrates, we now know that death has become a dies natalis, a day of birth, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word.

The Book of Sirach says, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers in their generations. . . .men renowned for their power, giving counsel by their understanding. . . .leaders of the people in their deliberations and in understanding of learning for the people, wise in their words of instruction.” Over the course of a priestly vocation and theological career spanning Vatican II and the subsequent fifty years, Fr. Matthew Lamb was indeed among such great men.

He was born in 1937 and entered a Trappist monastery just before his fifteenth birthday. For many years, he lived the Trappist life of prayer and work, silence, and fasting – and of studying the Scripture, the Fathers, Aquinas, as well as contemporary theological scholarship.

During the 1960s, his abbot suggested that he go to Rome to earn advanced degrees in theology. There he encountered Bernard Lonergan, a scholar and teacher who inspired countless Catholic theologians who would go on to impact Catholic theology around the globe. In his later years, he would describe Lonergan’s influence, especially in relation to a deepening of his understanding of the wisdom found in Augustine and Aquinas.

After earning an STL from the Gregorianum in Rome, he went to study at the University of Münster, Germany under Johann Baptist Metz. He completed his Doctorate in Theology (Dr. Theol.) “Summa cum laude” and earned the University Prize for the best dissertation in Catholic Theology in 1974.

From that time forward, he dedicated himself to a singular task: the formation of doctoral students in the Catholic theological tradition. Fr. Lamb’s doctoral instruction would span five decades, first at Marquette, then Boston College, and finally Ave Maria University, where he founded and directed the Patrick F. Taylor Graduate Programs in Theology. Fr. Lamb’s doctoral students now teach across the United States and abroad, in seminaries, colleges, and universities.

Father Lamb

In 1990, he published an epochal essay in America Magazine entitled, “Will There Be Catholic Theology in the United States?” He went public with the beginning of what he would lightheartedly call “Lamb’s Lamentations.” He cautioned against what he termed the “Protestantization” of Catholic theology, combined with the loss of knowledge of Latin and Greek, which left students estranged from the sources of the Catholic theological tradition.

He became increasingly concerned that more and more Catholic theologians “no longer know what they don’t know.” He warned in a 1997 essay that over 90 percent of systematic theologians were doing dissertations focused on recent figures, with the result that real grounding in – as well as well as fidelity to – the dogmatic tradition was no longer being handed on to the next generation.

So he labored many years to pass along to students the intellectual patrimony he had received, culminating in his directing almost fifty dissertations and serving as a reader on almost as many others. He published over a hundred and sixty articles dealing with Augustine, Aquinas, Lonergan, theological method, political theology, modernism, communication theory, and the writings of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. In 2002, he received an honorary doctorate from the Franciscan University of Steubenville in recognition of his contributions to the renewal of Catholic theology.

In 2003, Fr. Lamb delivered the academic convocation address at the newly-founded Ave Maria University. He challenged the young institution to strive to unite the first millennium’s quest for wisdom and holiness within the monastic traditions and the second millennium’s search for science and scholarship within the universities, a unity that he perceived had been severed over time causing great injury to society and the practice of theology.

To issue such a challenge took much understanding of the Church’s theological patrimony and much experience of the Church’s tradition of prayer. What took greater courage, however, was that Fr. Lamb was willing to leave his established position at Boston College and join this small institution with the fixed purpose of establishing and sustaining graduate programs in theology. Fr. Lamb became a champion for an authentic reception of Vatican II as a renewal within tradition.

In Fides et Ratio, Pope Saint John Paul II wrote, “It must not be forgotten that reason too needs to be sustained in all its searching by trusting dialogue and sincere friendship. A climate of suspicion and distrust, which can beset speculative research, ignores the teaching of the ancient philosophers who proposed friendship as one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical inquiry.”In Christ, Fr. Lamb fostered such relationships of friendship that sustained authentic inquiry into the realities of the Catholic faith. In addition to being a father and teacher to so many students, young and old, clerical and lay, he also became a friend.

Fr. Lamb passed through the portals of death on January 12, 2018. He died, as was providentially fitting, with two doctoral students praying and keeping vigil at his bedside throughout the night. In the many funeral Masses he had celebrated for others, he would often say that “they now see what we only believe.” He would say this with real joy, however, not with the sighs and half-hopes that one often feels. In his daily life, he felt himself in a living communion with Christ Jesus.

Fr. Lamb passed through the portals of death on January 12, 2018. He died, as was providentially fitting, with two doctoral students praying and keeping vigil at his bedside throughout the night. In the many funeral Masses he had celebrated for others, he would often say that “they now see what we only believe.” He would say this with real joy, however, not with the sighs and half-hopes that one often feels. In his daily life, he felt himself in a living communion with Christ Jesus.

Let us pray that through the abundant divine mercy he is now gazing in that most loving and beatifying vision upon the most holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

How to Destroy Catholicism in America

May I respectfully recommend a study of the history of liberal Protestantism in the USA? You will soon see that today’s liberal Catholics are traveling down the same road that liberal Protestants traveled down earlier – that is, a road to destruction.

It’s hard to blame the old Protestants for what they did, for they didn’t know where this road led. They were pioneers, they were cutting a path in the religious wilderness. They feared that traditional Christianity was becoming unbelievable; that if they didn’t modernize their religion by dropping certain old-fashioned doctrines, modern men and women would no longer be able to accept Christianity.

As it turned out, to modernize Christianity, at least if you carry this modernization process beyond a certain limited point, is to destroy it. Look at the liberal Protestant denominations today. All of them are shrinking rapidly in numbers. All of them have lost much of their once-great social influence.

But liberal Catholics don’t have this excuse. They can’t very well say, “We didn’t know where our liberalism was taking the Church.” For they have the precedent of liberal Protestantism in front of them. Their ignorance is vincible – and culpable.

Liberal Christians, beginning with the Boston Unitarians of the late 1700s and early 1800s, always “improve” Christianity according to the same pattern. The pattern is this: You attempt to blend what seems to you to be the essentials of Christianity with the best in whatever happens to be the fashionable anti-Christianity of the day. This synthesis, partly Christian and partly anti-Christian, will, of course, be incoherent; but at the moment you’re creating it, it looks pretty good.

In the generation after the American Revolution, the fashionable form of anti-Christianity was Deism. And so the Boston Unitarians said in effect, “While Deism is very wrong in its rejection of Christianity, the Deists, it must be admitted, make a few good points. So let’s toss out the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ and Original Sin. We’ll then have a purified Christianity.”

In the post-Civil War era, the fashionable form of anti-Christianity was a triple-headed threat: (1) agnosticism; (2) evolutionary theory; plus (3) a skeptical higher criticism of the Bible. Liberal Protestants responded by becoming near-agnostics while arguing that Christianity is far more about morality than knowledge: doctrine is of little real importance.

They became evolutionists, holding not just that biological species have evolved (under God’s guidance) but that religion itself has evolved, Christianity being but its latest result, and we should expect more evolution in the future. As for the Bible . . . oh, well. It abounds in errors, but it’s still a very good book.

Thomas Jefferson’s cut-and-paste Bible

In the 1960s and 1970s the fashionable form of anti-Christianity was the sexual revolution – a total rejection of traditional Christian sexual morality and, by implication, a rejection of virtually all the rest of Christian teaching; for if Christianity had been wrong for all these centuries about sex, wasn’t it likely that it was wrong about almost everything else?

As usual, liberal Protestants responded by blending Christianity (what was left of it) with this form of anti-Christianity, announcing that Christianity, correctly understood, was perfectly compatible with fornication, homosexuality, and abortion.

Liberal Protestant thinkers remind me of certain U.S. Supreme Court justices. The latter “find” things in the Constitution that aren’t there (e.g., rights to abortion and same-sex marriage). The former “find” things in the Bible that aren’t there. They claim that the Bible, rightly understood, mandates the watering down of Biblical religion and morality.

It’s as if the most important teaching of the Bible is, “Don’t take the Bible too seriously.” In reality, of course, they find these new “truths” not in the Bible but in the anti-Christianity that happens to be flourishing at the moment, much as some German Protestants in the 1930s “found” – mirabile dictu – that the Bible justified Nazism.

Anybody familiar with the history of modernizing Protestantism cannot help but see this same thing going on today among many Catholics. Catholics, it is true, are moving in this direction only gradually, and this for a few reasons.

For one, they got into the game much later than Protestants did. Second, the RC Church still has bishops in places of authority, even though many bishops are reluctant, or unable, to wield their authority. Third, the Nicene or Apostles Creed is still recited at Mass, which serves as an obstacle to kicking orthodoxy completely out the door.

Orthodox Catholic morality, however, especially sexual morality, is not included in the Creeds. And so it’s easier to get rid of. You get rid of it in three steps.

Step one: silence. You don’t talk about it, or you very rarely talk about it. Most Catholic leaders today are shy about teaching Catholic sexual doctrine. In some cases, this is because they don’t really believe in it, but in most cases it is probably because they don’t want to offend folks in the pews. When it comes to the sexual behavior of gays and lesbians, our leaders know that public opinion increasingly views it as shockingly un-American or un-Christian to disapprove of homosexual sodomy.

Step two: you modify that old saying about “hate the sin, love the sinner.” Instead, you love the sinner so much that don’t bother mentioning the sin, for that would hurt the feelings of the well-loved sinner, and that would be a sin against Christian charity, wouldn’t it? The most conspicuous example of this today is the small book by Fr. James Martin, S.J., Building a Bridge. Fr. Martin tells us he is fully orthodox. I don’t doubt his sincerity, but I know, having studied the history of liberal Protestantism, where Fr. Martin, whatever his intentions may be, is leading us.

Step three: you declare that the Church will eventually, maybe 50 or 100 years from now, come around to your opinion. You argue that your apparent heresy is really nothing but premature orthodoxy.

That’s the sure-fire, historically proven way to destroy the Catholic religion in America.

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